Multilingualism, social inequalities, and mental health: an anthropological study in Mauritius

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Abstract

This thesis analyses two different features of Mauritian society in
relation to multilingualism. The first is how multilingualism appears in
everyday Mauritian life. The second is how it influences mental health
provision in this country. The sociolinguistics of Mauritius has drawn the
attention of many linguists in the past (Baker 1972; Stein 1982; Rajah-
Carrim 2004; Biltoo 2004; Atchia-Emmerich 2005; Thomson 2008), but
linguists tend to have quite different views on Mauritian languages than
many Mauritians themselves.
Language shifts and diverse language games in the
Wittgensteinian sense are commonplace in Mauritius, and have been in
the focus of linguistic and anthropological interest (Rajah-Carrim 2004
and Eisenlohr 2007), but this is the first research so far about the situation
in the clinical arena. Sociolinguistic studies tend to revolve only around a
few other domains of language; in particular, there is great attention on
proper language use – or the lack of it – in education, which diverts
attention away from equally important domains of social life. Little has
been published and is known about mental health, the state of psychology
and psychiatry in Mauritius and its relationship with language use.
This work demonstrates that mental health can provide a new
viewpoint to understand complex social processes in Mauritius. People
dealing with mental health problems come across certain, dedicated social
institutions that reflect, represent and form an important part of the wider
society. This encounter is to a great extent verbal; therefore, the use of
language or languages here can serve as an object of observation for the
researcher. The agency of the social actors in question – patients,
relatives and staff members in selected settings – manifests largely in
speaking, including sometimes a choice of available languages and
language variations. This choice is influenced by the pragmatism of the
‘problem’ that brings the patient to those institutions but also
simultaneously determined by the dynamic complexity of sociohistorical
and economic circumstances.
It is surprising for many policy makers and theorists that social
suffering has not lessened in recent decades in spite of global
technological advancements and increased democracy. This thesis
demonstrates through ethnographic examples that existing provisions
(particularly in biomedicine) that have been created to attend to problems
of mental health may operate contrary to the principle of help. In the case
of Mauritius, this distress is significantly due to postcolonial inequities
and elite rivalries that are in significant measure associated with the use
of postcolonial languages. Biomedical institutions and particularly the
encounters among social actors in biomedical institutions, which are not
isolated or independent from the prevailing social context, can contribute
to the reproduction of social suffering.